Dredging funds still not a sure thing

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- Funding for the city’s dredging project, which was

nearly lost earlier this summer, could face still more threats if the

city can’t find a way to keep the money secure before it is spent, city

officials said Thursday.

California voters in March approved Proposition 12 -- also known as

the water bond -- which included $13 million for an ambitious Upper

Newport Bay dredging project. But that money was almost snatched from the

city in June when other cities intervened in the budget process,

attempting to spend all the available bond money.

The money was later reallocated to Newport Beach’s dredging plan, but

only after a major lobbying effort from the city.

The problem now is simply that the money has not yet been spent, and

most of it will not be spent for several years. That’s worrisome, said

Deputy City Manager Dave Kiff, for two reasons.

One problem is that the state Legislature sets limits on the amount of

time a municipality is given to spend money allocated to it under a bond

act. The dredging project is currently only in the preliminary planning

stages and will probably not actually begin to be physically carried out

until 2003.

Dick Wayman, spokesman for the Coastal Conservancy, the state

organization that administers the dredging funding, said Newport Beach

will probably manage to meet legislative deadlines.

“The general story has been that money, once appropriated, has to be

spent within five years,” he said, noting that pending legislation could

add greater flexibility to the way money can be spent over long periods

of time.

A second concern, Kiff said, is that other agencies, seeing the money

unused, could be tempted to swoop in and claim it for other projects as

they attempted to do in June.

For that reason, he said, the slow time frame for the dredging project

-- a collaboration between many city, county and federal agencies -- is

unfortunate.

“It seems like if any project could move fast, it would be this one,”

he said.

He joked that the city should hope for a strong El Nino year to fill

up the bay more quickly with silt, since such critical conditions might

lead to a stepped-up schedule.

Tom Rossmiller, a coastal engineer for the county who is working on

the project, said that on multi-agency plans such as this one, slow

progress is par for the course.

“There’s an ‘I want to be the last’ syndrome,” he said. “Every agency

wants the other agency to sign off on the project first.”

But that same standard of slowness could also work in Newport’s favor,

Wayman said: the tortoise-like pace of other plans sets a precedent for

work being eventually carried out, even if it happens long after the

money is initially allocated.

“It’s certainly not unusual in the projects we do [for work to take

years to complete], but we wouldn’t anticipate any project of being in

danger.”